On TAP: Kuttner + Meyerson

It’s Impeachment, Stupid. Rudy Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s lawyer, has been crowing about an unconfirmed conversation in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team supposedly said that an impeachment would have to come before any indictment of the president.

In the upside-down world of the Trump defense, this is presented as a victory. To paraphrase the Greek general Pyrrhus, one more such victory and Trump is finished.

The end game of this presidency has always been impeachment. An indictment after the president’s removal from office would be frosting on the cake. And one can imagine a deal like the one that got Vice President Spiro T. Agnew out of office in 1973, in which a resignation is traded for reduced criminal prosecution.

(Agnew pled guilty to charges of tax evasion, but the more serious charges of corruption were dropped. The Agnew case is precedent for the assumption that a vice president or president can indeed be prosecuted for crimes committed before taking office as well as be impeached.)

For Trump, impeachment will likely come first. That’s why we can expect the 2018 congressional elections to include more voter suppression and dirty tricks than any in memory—because the stakes are so high.

Whether Mueller tenders his final report before or after November, if Democrats take control of Congress, impeachment becomes the first order of business. There is already enough obstruction of justice hidden in plain view to justify an impeachment, compounded by Trump selling out his country for his commercial interests—another likely impeachment count.

Republicans may hope that the threat of an impeachment will animate Trump voters to come to the polls. But as shown by the average swing of more than 20 points to Democrats in the six off-year elections for vacant House seats, there are just not enough diehard Trump voters to guarantee Republicans retain control of the House.

We may yet lose our democracy. But if we retain any semblance of it, expect impeachment proceedings to begin this fall.

In his inimitable fashion—that of a bigoted ignoramus—President Trump referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” in a meeting with similarly anti-immigrant officials on Wednesday.

“Animals” is probably not a term that more politic Republicans would use; it suggests a sensibility too crude for a proper elected official to put on display. But based on their actual treatment of undocumented immigrants, the thought that Trump voiced can’t be all that far from their own thinking.

Consider: Even as Trump was ranting away, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy were meeting on Capitol Hill with the handful of Republicans who’ve initiated the discharge petition that would compel the House to vote on the fate of the Dreamers. (Once a discharge petition has the signatures of a majority of House members, the bill or bills it concerns must be brought to the floor for a vote.) To date, 20 House Republicans have signed the petition; it would only take five more, plus all of the House’s 193 Democrats, who are all sure to sign, to reach the magic number of 218—a majority of the House.

According to an account in The Washington Post, McCarthy told the signatories that,

signing the discharge petition and paving the way for passage of a moderate immigration bill could hurt Republicans in November’s elections by depressing conservative turnout and upending leadership’s plans to focus on tax cuts and other GOP successes.

(What those other successes are is anybody’s guess.)

Ryan and McCarthy assured their off-the-reservation colleagues that they would in time bring an immigration bill before the House. Their colleagues weren’t buying it. “I didn’t hear a plan today,” said Michigan Representative David Trott, who became the 20th Republican to sign the petition yesterday. “Time’s running out. We need to do something.”

Indeed they do. Children are being taken from their parents at the border; law-abiding parents who’ve been in the nation for decades are being deported while their citizen children are left behind; and the Dreamers are condemned to a state of perpetual limbo. In response, Republican leaders do nothing, fearful of dousing the xenophobic and racist passions, stoked by the president, which they believe will drive their voters to the polls.

Paul Ryan would never call undocumented immigrants “animals.” He just treats them that way.

Trump’s Selling Out His Country for Personal Gain Continues. When the news broke that President Donald Trump was chiding the Commerce Department for sanctioning a Chinese tech company, ZTE, everything about the move was puzzling. ZTE epitomized why the Trump administration was taking a harder line against Beijing.

ZTE sold products containing U.S. products to Korea and Iran, and then tried to cover it up. The FCC has refused to prohibit U.S. carriers from buying equipment made by ZTE for fear of hidden “back doors” that could spy or introduce malware.

Yet Trump suddenly undercut his cabinet department last week with a mysterious tweet:

President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

Why on earth would Trump undermine his government’s own policy? One likely explanation soon became clear. On Tuesday, The National Review reported:

The Chinese government is extending a $500 million loan to a state-owned construction company to build an Indonesian theme park that will feature a Trump-branded golf course and hotels.

A subsidiary of Chinese state-owned construction firm Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC) signed a deal last week with the Indonesian firm MNC Land to build an “integrated lifestyle resort,” as part of Beijing’s global influence-expanding “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative.

The project will include a number of Trump-branded hotels, a golf course, and a residence. While the $500 million loan will not be directly allocated to any of the Trump-branded features, Beijing’s contribution of half the project’s total operating budget ensures the success of the broader theme-park venture.

This is not an explicit quid pro quo, of course, but Trump’s habits of subordinating the national interest to the profits of his family businesses continue. First Russia, now China. There’s a simple word for these habits: treason.

A new report out from the National Center for Education Statistics—one branch of the Department of Education that Betsy DeVos hasn’t gotten around to dismantling yet—finds that 94 percent of schoolteachers spend their own money buying supplies for their classrooms and students. On average, the teachers spend $479 a year.

(Having accompanied my daughter on several occasions to a Staples outlet during her years of teaching in inner-city Brooklyn, I can personally attest to the study’s findings that teachers—and on occasion, teachers’ parents—buy such basics as paper and pens when their schools run short.)

Rather than adequately funding public schools, our federal and some state governments have allowed teachers to take tax deductions, up to $250 annually, for their out-of-pocket school expenses. In their budget-balancing zeal (joke), Republicans initially proposed to eliminate that deduction in their tax bill, but were compelled to drop that proposal. Now, House Democrats have introduced a bill that would raise the allowable deduction to $500—not that the bill is going anywhere so long as Republicans control the government.

It makes you wonder if teacher colleges offer a course in school-supply shopping.

Too Normal. I had one of those “aha” experiences over the weekend. My wonderful nephew, Ben, graduated from medical school. To be precise, he graduated from the medical school of the University of South Carolina, in the state capital, Columbia.

The ceremony was lovely. Some 85 med students who had worked their hearts out for four years got accolades from teachers. The commencement speaker hit just the right notes. The locals were friendly, and the food was superb. It was as normal as any university setting could be.

But most citizens of this state voted for Donald Trump. And deep racism continues to define the South Carolina ruling elite, as installed by the electorate. Here’s what’s so troubling. Normal daily life coexists all too easily with the destruction of what’s decent in America, in the age of Trump.

Germans, at least those who were not Jewish or gay, must have had something of the same feeling circa 1937 as they went about their daily business in Berlin. The cafes were open, the universities held classes and graduated students, couples got married, babies were born. People went to work, did their jobs, paid their bills.

Some celebrated the dictator, some ignored him. But it was too normal.

Hannah Arendt referred to Adolph Eichmann and his crimes as the banality of evil—“terrifyingly normal.” There is something terrifying about how normal so much of daily life is today. I’ve been at dinners with friends where we congratulate each other at having gotten through a social evening without mentioning Trump.

I’m not saying that daily life and happy ceremonies should be suspended for the duration. But somehow, if we are to rid this nation of Trump, we must keep the menace he represents in our consciousness even as we find joy in life’s pleasures.

For more than 30 minutes on Wednesday, President Trump, his face “reddened” (that’s the description in today’s Washington Post), “yelled” (that’s from today’s New York Times) at his cabinet in general, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in particular, about the number of immigrants still crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

Trump’s tirade makes clear what’s behind our new Get-Tough (more precisely, Get-Sadistic) border apprehension policy, as announced Monday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Instead of simply busing undocumented border crossers who have no criminal records back to Mexico, our new policy is to incarcerate them all for the misdemeanor violation of crossing without papers, and to send children, no matter how young, to different detention facilities from their parents’.

What’s behind it is sheer rage, at once egomaniacal, xenophobic, and racist. Trump, the Times reports, claimed repeatedly during his first year in office that the 2017 drop in border crossings was entirely due to his tough stand. This year, however, as violence has grown unendurable in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the number of crossings has risen, stripping him of a much-loved (by him) talking point at his rallies and press encounters. Since the decline in crossings testified to his manly resolve, the rise in crossings perforce undermines it.

Can’t have that!

A “person close to Nielsen,” the Times reports, describes her as “miserable in her job,” and the paper also reported that following the meeting, she drafted a resignation letter that she was persuaded not to submit. Miserable? Could that mean she has been troubled by having to defend the parent-child separations, which she has done repeatedly and vociferously since accounts of the policy began appearing in the press? Could it be that she secretly thinks that separating a two-year-old from her mother for many months might actually not be in that two-year-old’s best interest? Could she, in some nether region of her consciousness, harbor some instincts of a minimally decent human being?

Probably not. But if she does, the president wants to make damn sure they never surface.

Homage to Stormy. It is somehow fitting that the indignation of a wronged porn star could lead to the final undoing of Donald Trump. Despite the growing power of the #MeToo movement, and the falling of predatory male icons across the political spectrum, the Predator-in-Chief has gotten away with it—until now.

As Deep Throat (whose nickname is now somehow doubly fitting) famously counseled, follow the money. So if we follow the money, Stormy’s rage against Trump and his fixer, Michael Cohen, has now led to the following chain of revelations.

Cohen was not running a law firm. He was running a money laundry. Send payments to Cohen, and you could pay disguised bribes to Donald Trump. As The New York Times has reported, Cohen’s dummy company received at least $4.4 million in funds including money from a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin, Viktor Vekselberg, as well as money from corporations doing business with the Trump administration, including Novartis and AT&T.

It was the lawyer for Stormy, Michael Avenatti, who first made much of this information public. The special counsel, Robert Mueller, might have unearthed these and other details in due course, but Stormy’s battle gave the issue a nice boost.

All of this is likely to put Michael Cohen at even greater legal jeopardy, and incline him to sing to prosecutors a couple octaves higher. In Trump’s America, in the era of #MeToo, in the era of Eric Schneiderman exposed as a thug, the person of relative honor is a porn star.

Stormy didn’t abuse or assault anybody, she didn’t try to bribe the government, and she didn’t launder money for the Kremlin. It’s a pretty low bar, but it may be enough to help bring down Trump.

Trying to identify the cruelest policy of the Trump administration may be a fool’s errand, but the new border policy unveiled yesterday in a speech by Attorney General Jeff Sessions has quickly moved to the head of the pack.

Until now, people apprehended while crossing the border without legal documentation have been routinely bused back to Mexico so long as they have no criminal records. Under the new policy, everyone apprehended will be placed in already jam-packed detention facilities and have their cases heard—eventually—by over-burdened immigration courts, which already stagger under a backload of cases it will take years to hear and decide.

And that’s not even the half of it. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Sessions also said that families who illegally cross the border may be separated after their arrest, with children sent to juvenile shelters while their parents are sent to adult detention facilities. Until now, border agents tried to keep parents and their children at the same detention site.”

Call it Trump’s “Suffer Little Children” initiative.

Which makes the point of the new policy unmistakably clear. It’s not to boost the income of private immigration prisons or make a mockery of the immigration courts. It’s to punish everyone who comes to America by crossing its southern border without papers, to make them languish indefinitely in those detention facilities until the courts, probably after a number of years, hear their cases. It’s to take children from their parents and keep them in different detention facilities for indefinite time periods as well. And by so doing, it intends to stop border crossings altogether—overlooking the fact that most border crossers are generally desperate or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.

So now, taking small children from their parents is official administration policy. A judge will soon rule in a case brought by the ACLU to stop this practice. If there’s a higher judge, He or She or It has surely already ruled on it.

Trump, Kerry, Korea, and the Logan Act. One of the possible charges against disgraced National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and quite possibly against Trump himself is that they violated the Logan Act. That’s the statute that dates to the early years of the Republic, making it a crime for a private citizen to attempt to conduct foreign policy, specifically to “influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” in a dispute with the United States or “to defeat the measures of the United States.”

It’s painfully clear that the Trump campaign did just that, in multiple contacts with Russia, both before and after the 2016 election. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to a Boston Globe report, has made multiple efforts in recent months to salvage the Iran deal, including a meeting with Iran’s foreign minister.

Donald Trump, by all indications a serial Logan offender, is predictably outraged. “The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,” the president tweeted. “He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has also blasted Kerry.

Let’s admit that this is tricky stuff. Henry Kissinger plainly violated the Logan Act when he had secret meetings with the North Vietnamese on the eve of the 1968 presidential election in an effort to slow down any deal that might help Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.

Though the law doesn’t explicitly say so, it seems far more offensive when a political campaign mucks around with sensitive foreign policy in an attempt to disadvantage the incumbent government. That starts bordering on treason.

Kerry’s bigger worry—and ours—is not that he might face prosecution under the Logan Act. It’s that Trump could destroy the Iran deal out of sheer spite.

However, one unlikely factor might prevent that: Trump’s overblown hopes for a deal with North Korea. But if Trump were to torpedo the Iran agreement, why should Kim Jong-Un trust that Trump won’t do the same with a Korea deal, should that prove expedient?

Trump, of course, is not famous for honoring trust—just ask any of several former business associates, not to mention his former wives. On the other hand, neither is he famous for making logical connections.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave. The problem with serial lies is that it becomes hard to keep them straight. Add to that a compulsive liar with a short attention span and a penchant for impulsive outbursts, and you have a first-class challenge. Especially when that serial liar happens to be under criminal investigation by prosecutors who, unlike their target, are experts at keeping facts straight.

Exhibit A is Stormy Daniels. First Trump denied knowing anything about the $130,000 hush money, and his hapless, lapdog lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, gamely went along with the lie. Then Trump's latest lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, blurted out on Fox News that Trump in fact was the source of the money. This was then confirmed, in more detail, by Trump, also on Fox. None of this seemed part of a coherent defense plan, just half-baked blurts.

This may not cause criminal liability for Trump since he has not said any of this under oath, but it sure puts Cohen in deeper jeopardy. It's not clear which of the earlier lies Cohen told the FBI, but none of this bodes well for Trump, since Cohen is under increasing pressure to sing. The fact that Cohen had to advance the money out of his home-equity loan, and is essentially a lawyer without clients, does not suggest a defendant with deep resources to resist.

Exhibit B is James Comey. Trump and the White House initially fabricated an elaborate cover story to justify Trump’s firing of the former FBI director. Trump then blurted out that in fact he had canned Comey because he doubted Comey’s loyalty. And then this week, Giuliani yet again—wait for it—on Fox News, said that Trump had fired Comey because Comey had refused to say that Trump was not a target in the investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

And there are dozens more such exhibits. Dwelling in an alternative post-fact universe where you can blithely make things up and then change your story may work sometimes in politics. It doesn’t work so well in a criminal or a potential impeachment investigation.

And to compound the damage further, Trump’s latest lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seems to have some of the same character traits as his client. Your lawyer is supposed to be circumspect, cautious, and there to rein in your impulses. Giuliani is almost as impulsive as Trump. (With a lawyer like this, who needs prosecutors?)

And why in the world openly talk strategy on Fox News? You would think that Trump and Giuliani assume that the only court that matters is Fox. That’s surely how they’ve manipulated public opinion, but at the end of the day, Trump’s fate will be decided by real prosecutors, not by fawning interviews.

There’s an old saying that a lie is halfway around the world when the truth is just getting its boots on. That may be true of ordinary, individual lies, but the truth has a way of catching up with serial lies and serial liars.